Entertainment

Talking Soccer and Social Media With Sports Illustrated's Grant Wahl

If you're a content-starved, social media-savvy soccer fan in America, chances are high that Grant Wahl's among your most essential Twitter follows. The Sports Illustrated senior writer and Fox Soccer TV analyst is the most prominent American journalist covering the "beautiful game" and as a never-ending source of analysis, news and features is a perfect portal for keeping up to date with soccer stateside and around the world.

Wahl joined Twitter in summer 2009, right around when he transitioned to covering soccer full time for SI and SI.com (he previously wrote about college basketball). He calls that a "fortuitous" bit of timing and has since amassed more than 250,000 followers on the network. Twitter has since become an integral part of his job and a centerpiece to how he finds stories, keeps up on soccer news and interacts with fans, players and other journalists.

We recently caught up with Wahl to talk about how social media has affected the soccer landscape, how it unifies fans of the world's most global sport and how it's changed his job over the past few years.

Q&A With Grant Wahl

You're a must-follow for soccer fans and have built up a huge following on Twitter. How has it changed the way you work and do you make a point of trying to share certains types of things with followers?

Twitter is a great tool for shrinking this gigantic soccer world into something more manageable that you can follow in real time. The very first thing I do when I start my day is check Twitter. Obviously in Europe, their day has already started, so I can check and see what's going on there and then start working.

I try to share things that interest me. I figure if I learn something, then my readers will learn something too, whether it's news or a link to a good piece I've seen. A good mix of domestic and international soccer seems to be a good way to go when building an audience. The sport's obviously international, but the domestic side is growing all the time. Just guessing, I'd say the slight majority of my followers come from the U.S. But all soccer fans tend to follow the big events. Champions League, the English Premier League, things like that — all of us who follow the sport around the world are watching a lot of the same things.

Are there downsides to the effect of Twitter on your job?

The positives are so much bigger than the negatives, but you're going to sometimes deal with people who profane or threatening or whatever. But I've got pretty thick skin — in multiple languages now, at that. There's also so much demand for soccer news around the world that you've got to be careful to follow reliable new sources. There's a little trial and error in deciding who's worth retweeting or not, but you have to err on the side of caution.

You mentioned Twitter shrinking the soccer world. Do you think Twitter and social media overall play a bigger role with soccer fans, players and media because of what a global game it is?

It really does help, because it's so easy now to connect with journalists in other countries, and with athletes all over. I'm DMing with players in different countries and you build some relationships that way. One example: Xabi Alonso, a top player for Spain and Real Madrid, just started following me and seems to be very forward-thinking when it comes to social media, so we've gotten to know each other a bit. That's how I met the guy. Sometimes I'll set up interviews over DM. A lot of barriers have disappeared in recent years when it comes to the ease of connecting.

In English soccer there seems to be a lot of Twitter-related drama. Racist trolling is relatively common and Ashley Cole just got fined $145,000 for a tweet, for example. Why does so much of this sort of news come from there?

There's a few things going on here. First, European soccer has had problems with racism of different types in recent years — players saying things to other players, fans chanting things at players, throwing bananas on the field. So to see it happening via social media is something that's fairly shocking to U.S. fans, and another difference is that you can actually get prosecuted in England for directing a racist tweet at someone. We've seen examples where people have actually spent time in jail for sending a racist tweet.

Media coverage is also different there. There's so much demand for soccer coverage in England and — in part because the sport's already so big over there — there's much less media access to the players. So that's created some different types of media coverage in England, from the tabloids to the broadsheets, and I think it's probably a fair statement that athletes over there need to watch what they say on Twitter a little bit more.

Last thing: Besides yourself, what are the first Twitter — or just social media — accounts that come to mind for soccer fans looking to get more into the sport?

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